AP Writer Learns that Online Speech Isn't Always Free

By TChris, Section Civil Liberties
Posted on Sun Jul 06, 2008 at 04:28:43 PM EST
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Yahoo is not the government. It has no obligation to respect your right to free speech. In fact, you give Yahoo the right to delete anything you upload if it contravenes Yahoo's difficult-to-discern standards. When Yahoo deletes publicly displayed content (or when TalkLeft does, for that matter) it is not playing a "governmental role," as this writer asserts. Substitute "managerial role," and the writer has a point.

Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that's controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.
The governmental role that companies play online is taking on greater importance as their services - from online hangouts to virtual repositories of photos and video - become more central to public discourse around the world.

Sometimes those judgments seem arbitrary: [more ...]

Dutch photographer Maarten Dors met the limits of free speech at Yahoo Inc.'s photo-sharing service, Flickr, when he posted an image of an early-adolescent boy with disheveled hair and a ragged T-shirt, staring blankly with a lit cigarette in his mouth.
Without prior notice, Yahoo deleted the photo on grounds it violated an unwritten ban on depicting children smoking. Dors eventually convinced a Yahoo manager that - far from promoting smoking - the photo had value as a statement on poverty and street life in Romania. Yet another employee deleted it again a few months later.

Sometimes the desire not to offend is carried to extreme lengths:

[I]n response to complaints it would not specify, Network Solutions LLC decided to suspend a Web hosting account that Dutch filmmaker Geert Wilders was using to promote a movie that criticizes the Quran — before the movie was even posted and without the company finding any actual violation of its rules.

One remedy is to try a site that might be more receptive to the user's taste. True, as the writer notes, leaving Facebook or YouTube or Flickr for a less populated if more forgiving website might be tough, but if enough users disagree with a site's posting policies, competing sites will attract more users and become the new cool place to hang out. Such is the beauty of the internet.

Another remedy is to keep complaining. In Dors' case, it worked.

Dors ultimately got his photo restored a second time, and Yahoo has apologized, acknowledging its community managers went too far.

Actually, if you look at Dors' work, it seems that Flickr has given him a fair amount of leeway to post some photos that some might deem controversial.

None of the AP writer's observations are shocking. It has long been understood that freedom of the press belongs to those who own a press. The electronic equivalent of the press is a website. If you want to participate in a privately owned website, you play by the owner's rules, whether or not they seem fair to you.

< Absent A Change . . . | Kerry Questions McCain's Judgment >

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AP Writer Learns that Online Speech Isn't Always Free | 7 comments (7 topical)

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True Enough, But At What Point (5.00 / 1) (#1)
by The Maven on Sun Jul 06, 2008 at 05:37:01 PM EST

do privately-owned website begin to approach the level of becoming an agent of the government? Is the line crossed when Google/YouTube provides specific user data? (I know that the current flare-up here involved a private-party copyright lawsuit, but imagine that it was the gov't.) Is it crossed when Yahoo turns over user information to Chinese authorities who arrest and/or torture Falun Gong members? What about Facebook or Myspace membership lists or friends linkages?

I don't pretend to have all the answers, but it seems to me that these are questions that will become more frequent over time unless they are fully and definitively resoved, either by some international convention (not very probable, given the nature of those countries most likely to violate any such standards) or by a series of court rulings in the US and EC.

Few people can pretend to understand all the rules of many major commercial websites, and even those few who actually might would still find it very difficult to cause the website to back down. Dors was fortunate here, but I suspect that his case is rather exceptional.

can "private" become public? (5.00 / 1) (#2)
by DandyTIger on Sun Jul 06, 2008 at 06:35:01 PM EST

yahoo and other spaces remind me of shopping malls. Both are private corporate owned spaces where the corporation walks a tight rope of wanting to restrict what happens but doesn't want to be held accountable and responsible for having to restrict the space. But when a shopping mall essentially becomes the town square and really the only public space for people to gather, then at some point it might cross a line and become a defacto public square. I seem to remember there have been some court rulings on private malls becoming public squares, but I'm not sure. And I wonder if that can happen, can it also happen with something like a really widely used public square space on the internet.

one could easily (5.00 / 1) (#5)
by cpinva on Sun Jul 06, 2008 at 11:19:38 PM EST

make a compelling argument that, because of the public nature of the routes traversed, and rights-of-way granted, that these companies have, to some extent, given up their right to act as a wholly private venture, since much of the infrastructure they use was funded by tax dollars.

you really can't have it both ways.

: that doesn't seem like a compelling argument (none / 0) (#6)
by sirhamster on Mon Jul 07, 2008 at 10:43:24 AM EST

cpinva, how would you apply that argument? Wouldn't the majority of websites on the internet fall under that category?
public nature - if that means being publicly accessible, that'd be the vast majority of websites we use (like this one!)
uses tax-dollar funded infrastructure (the Internet) - true by definition for any website
Also, what's stopping the photographer from creating his own website to share his photos? It might cost some money, but it costs money for Yahoo! to host those photos, too. To go back to the First Amendment: It guarantees the right to unrestricted speech, not a free printing press (or hosting service)

The intertubes hark back to Arpanet (none / 0) (#3)
by wurman on Sun Jul 06, 2008 at 07:01:45 PM EST

Much of the "net" in internet was originally established as part of the "defense industry + universities + research institutions" originally invented by V-P Gore when he was arepresentative.

There is a large component of "public" sources for the internet from hard-wired communication lines subsidized by the really old, old AT&T customers (our old-time phone bills had fees to capitalize the company's new construction). The microwave relay towers were partially subsidized with tax dollars to carry government (especially military) communications alongside the old AT&T long distance traffic. Who put the satellites in space orbit with whose money?

This whole gig is tiresome: some internet sources want to behave as if they used investor capital to fund vastly expensive infrastructure when they didn't spend a dime--they just went online with existing facilities built & paid for by other entities, often publicly funded sources.

Humbug.

OK.... (none / 0) (#4)
by Lora on Sun Jul 06, 2008 at 08:16:17 PM EST

A photo-sharing "service" is different from a website such as TalkLeft.

What if AT&T banned certain discussions on its cell phone airwaves? Public or private? How about Verizon?

How about email content? For that matter, content of letters that are delivered through FedEx? The US postal service?

Where do you draw the line?

Efforts made by Network Solutions (none / 0) (#7)
by Connie Bensen at Network Solutions on Mon Jul 07, 2008 at 11:41:33 AM EST

Hi,
I'm Connie Bensen, and I work at Network Solutions. In the case you referenced, a private matter, Network Solutions reached out the owner several times about this situation as security risks arose. The owner never responded to our efforts to contact him, and to this date, still hasn't responded. We were willing to work the issue out to an amiable end, but the lack of correspondence forced us to shut down the site. You can see the official statement here

Thanks and let me know if you need more information.